The Final Wish

The Final Wish is a 2018 mystery-horror film directed by Timothy Woodward Jr., written by Jeffrey Reddick (also co-producer), William Halfon and Jonathan Doyle, and starring Lin Shaye and Michael Welch. Distributed by Cinedigm Entertainment Group, The Final Wish was released on October 17, 2018 at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival.

Plot
A young girl is dropped off home after her date. As she walks into the house, she makes her way to the bathroom, where she turns on the light. After that, she hears noises and starts calling out to her parents. She gets no response from them, so she makes her way around the house, still calling out to them. She hears noises coming from the living room. She opens the door and turns the light on and sees the lamp laying on the floor, showing her dead mother's body cut in half.

She turns around and suddenly sees her father covered in blood holding a samurai sword. From the shock of seeing her father bloody and agitated, she falls back and lands on the floor next to her dead mother & starts to cry. As she starts to get up, her father is standing over her with an evil smile as the girl yells out ‘dad, please!’. Aaron Hammond is a struggling law school graduate who returns to his rural hometown following the death of his father. Dealing with grief and the unresolved tension with his mother, Kate, Aaron starts going through his father's belongings.

Among the varied items, he discovers a mysterious antique urn that his father, a keen collector of old artifacts, had recently acquired. Intrigued by the urn and its intricate inscriptions, Aaron tries to sell the urn for $3,000 to try and pay his missed rent. After issues with his laptop, he goes outside and sees his best friend standing on the porch in the dark. They hug each other and get high in Aaron’s room, where Jeremy tells Aaron that the urn looks scary looking. After being at a local dinner with Jeremy, Aaron heads home, where the urn is still in his room.

Aaron inadvertently releases an ancient malevolent spirit trapped within the urn - a spirit that grants wishes. Aarons starts to make wishes without realizing that he is making them. His wishes turn out to have horrifying consequences for the price of each wish he makes. One of Aarons wishes is for his mother, Kate, to forget about his father so she can move on from her grief. The result is devastating. Kate loses all her memories, not just those of her deceased husband, reducing her to a state of utter confusion and anguish, so much so that Aaron and Jeremy are sitting in the car at Aaron’s house, Aaron hears music playing coming from the barn. He goes to investigate and finds his mother dancing with the dead corpse of his father. Aaron, shocked, wishes his father away, making his mother angry.

Aaron, horrified, runs back to the car and sees Jeremy is gone. Aaron goes to Jeremy’s house and knocks on the door. Jeremy’s mother answers surprised to see Aaron. Aaron asks her if he can talk to Jeremy. Jeremy’s mother is surprised again… she tells Aaron that Jeremy has been dead for a year and died in a car accident a year ago and that she told his mother about his death. Aaron surprised and shocked tells Jeremy’s mother that can’t be and that he only saw Jeremy today. Jeremy’s mother tells Aaron to leave.

Aaron goes to Lisa and tells her what has been happening. As Aaron tells Lisa about the wishes, Lisa, skeptical, asks Aaron to show her the urn. He shows her the picture of it, Lisa takes Aaron to see a local antique dealer, who suggests that the urn might be a notorious 'Dybbuk box', notorious in Jewish folklore for containing malevolent spirits. The dealer tells Aaron and Lisa about the previous owner ‘Williams’ who tells them that Williams went mad & killed his wife, and cut his own tongue out. The dealer tells them that he is still alive, and his daughter still lives in the house where Williams killed his wife.

Aaron and Lisa go to pay a visit to William's daughter, who asks him where the urn is. He tells her he doesn’t have it on him. She advises them that her dad made wishes and made a wish that there could be two replicas of his wife so he could spend more time with her. Williams daughter tells them that her father will know what to do. William's daughter takes them to the asylum where her father is. They meet him, and he writes down asking how many wishes Aaron had made, Aaron tells him he has made maybe 5 or 6 wishes. He tells Aaron not to make a 7th wish. That is why Williams cut his tongue out. Aaron asks what would happen if he did, William writes down that he would lose his soul.

The djinn starts taunting Aaron. As Aaron and Lisa get back to Aaron’s place, they look for his mother. When they check the barn, they find his mother hanging from the beam. Aaron calls 911, but instead has hallucinations. He tells the djinn to show themselves, and the djinn appears as an entity. Aaron tries to kill himself, but a knock at the door reveals it to be the sheriff. The sheriff tells Aaron to stay away from Lisa. Aaron makes a wish that he would stop hurting Lisa. However, the sheriff turns out to be the djinn, telling Aaron "As you wish".

Lisa turns up at Tyrone’s and tells him that the sheriff is getting the judge to revoke his bail - that the sheriff has evidence. The sheriff returns home, where Lisa is in the bathtub. Tyrone turns up at the sheriffs house, where he confronts him about the so-called revoke of his bail. Lisa gets a phone call from Aaron, but she gets out of the bathtub, missing Aaron's call. As she heads up the stairs, she sees Tyrone and the sheriff fighting and quickly pulls Tyrone off the sheriff. Tyrone tells Lisa that she told him about the revoke of his bail, to which Lisa says that she has not seen him all week. The sheriff gets up and Tyrone shoots him dead. Aaron quickly bolts through the door and tells Lisa that he made a wish that the sheriff would never hurt Lisa again. Tyrone, confused, tells them to tell him what is going on. He accidentally shoots Lisa, who dies in Aaron’s arms.

Aaron makes one final wish as the djinn appears. Aaron wishes that he died the day Tyrone moved his car and hit him. The next day, Aaron wakes up in his bed. He waves at the mirror next to the bed and takes a sip of water from the glass next to his bed. Soon, Aaron realizes that he isn’t in his room and that his soul is stuck in the mirror. The movie ends with Kate doing a yard sale. Lisa shows up, and Kate tells Lisa that she's moving and is looking forward to it. Lisa tells Kate to come visit her in Chicago. Kate smiles and gives the urn to Lisa, hinting at the continuation of the curse.

Cast

 * Lin Shaye as Kate Hammond
 * Michael Welch as Aaron Hammond
 * Melissa Bolona as Lisa
 * Spencer Locke as Lynette
 * Tony Todd as Colin
 * Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau as Derek (credited as "Kaiwi Lyman")
 * Jonathan Daniel Brown as Jeremy
 * Jean Elie as Tyrone
 * Christopher Murray as Yates
 * Douglas Tait as Jinn
 * Larry Poole as Chester Hammond

Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, The Final Wish has an approval rating of based on  reviews, with an average score of. Frank Ochieng from the "SF Crowsnest" gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars and stated: "Wish is strangely contemplative in its attempt to shine an eerie light on the mysteries of death and estrangement. Woodward's gory gem is more of the psychological horror variety as it adequately taps into the realm of a messy mindset gone haywire." Noel Murray, reviewing for the newspaper Los Angeles Times, opined, "By the time 'The Final Wish' gets to the much more effective suspense sequences - and the enjoyably perverse twists - it's too little and too late." Jennie Kermode from the online magazine "Eye for Film" gave the movie 3.5 out of 5 stars and wrote: "Focused primarily on psychological horror but also dealing out a fair number of shocks and scares, The Final Wish is a well-crafted film that's likely to appeal to a broad range of genre fans."